x.com/i/status/2062791534236โฆ
An unfortunate example.
I'm sure Vertigo Amsterdam was full of talented developers who love VR. The standalone market just can't sustain it.
They have "big games" in their portfolio (Arizona Sunshine, Metro Awakening), but a deeper look shows no PCVR exclusives.
Arizona Sunshine (original Remake Arizona Sunshine 2)
After the Fall
Metro Awakening
Thief VR: Legacy of Shadow
The 7th Guest VR
Unplugged: Air Guitar
Hellsweeper VR
A Fishermanโs Tale (1 2)
Skyworld: Kingdom Brawl
Maskmaker
Traffic Jams
Every game on the list is either a standalone exclusive or cross platform.
Kids with standalone headsets have the attention span of a gnat and the buying power of a margin investor circa October 2029. They want free live service games that are interesting for 90 minutes. These games work on iPads and iPhones, but ffs they fail so hard in VR.
So when studios attempt to capture the PCVR and standalone markets simultaneously... Arizona Sunshine and Metro Awakening happens.
Objectively decent games, sure... But uninteresting to PCVR purists looking for and willing to pay for something extraordinary... and too expensive, too long, and too unremarkable to blow up among the tweens and 10 year old iPad kids with quest headsets.
#VR is for PC gamers.
We need a couple ballsy studios with the talent and capital to sell headsets (Valve), a couple PCVR/PC cross platform hyper-niche giants (Eagle Dynamics, iRacing), and an army of independent developers able and willing to risk building extraordinary experiences that will sell ~100k-~200k copies.
VR is extremely niche. Lowering the barrier to entry, mass marketing to casuals, subsidizing developers, and churning out mobile content has been tried at scale. It failed.
That doesn't mean VR is dead. VR is alive and well among its extremely niche market segment - flight sim nerds, racing sim nerds, and gamer adults with expendable income.
VR is for PC gaming. Standalone is a failed side show until such time as technological maturity makes standalone and PCVR indistinguishable from one another.
Until then, I think Valve has the right track with the frame. Make a great platform available to PC gamers and PCVR developers. Make it modular such that aftermarket tinkerers can go nuts. Don't leverage the whole damn business on it.
And don't worry too much about price because the market segment that matters isn't much worried about it either.
1 million regular PCVR users and 20 badass games is plenty good for VR.